Unlock Your Company’s Potential

A review of online marketing best practice shows that current trends and data dictates that for optimal success in online marketing the aim should be to drive custom directly to your own website.

2017 sees companies keeping a digital focus in their marketing strategies. Increasingly a key element to ensuring business growth and retention is online customer experience, (Adobe and Econsultancy white paper, Digital Trends 2017). Audiences have increasingly high expectations for seamless, reliable content and consistent identity across the brand from off-line to on-line, along with touch points of personalisation. Harvard Business Review, The Ultimate Marketing Machine, determined that there is ever increasing evidence in the value of putting customers central to their journey. This significant component cannot be achieved through third party websites, but only by businesses preserving maximum autonomy in every touch point with their audience, be it the product, brand or service.

Another key benefit is the ability to capture significant information about your audience. It provides the foundation and can have a far-reaching impact that ultimately assists with the direction and growth of your company. Seed Digital white paper, “The Importance of Understanding your Customers” highlights that “Developing a deep understanding of the people involved with your product/business and how they relate to your value proposition is the key to a great business.”

Through website analytics, not only do you know the number of people visiting your site but you can gather a much richer and specific picture of your customers and audience that could ever before be reached through traditional research channels. This in turn provides such scope and possibilities for tailored content, products and services to keep audiences engaged and your business flourishing. Today, data driven marketing is invaluable, and it is therefore no coincidence that “the vast majority (97%) of survey respondents (Digital Trends 2017) are planning to increase or maintain the level of their investment in marketing analytics”.

Consequently, with your website delivering the products and content your targeted customers are searching for as well as maintaining a high quality of service, the chances of conversion to sales will be much greater. A better level of personalisation increases the chance of people sharing their positive experiences about your brand and products, which in turn results in a strong following of loyal returning customers. As Digital Trends 2015 highlights, “the vast majority (71%) of digital marketers still see desktop websites – with the incentive of useful cookie data on consumers – as their top priority for customers”.

Therefore, building a relationship with customers through online interaction is crucial to any business, and can be a game changer. "By engaging customers effectively, companies can gain competitive advantage, increase customer loyalty, enhance revenue, and better manage their operational costs” (Verint and KANA white paper, A Strategic Approach to Customer Engagement Optimisation). With customers spending more time on your website the chances of interaction increase and you can capture valuable contact information to be used for future directed marketing, whether this be emails, phone calls, newsletters etc. Generating such channels is vital for retention and creating possible future sales, of which would have otherwise been lost. “Email marketing remains firmly central from driving revenue to using it as a customer experience to maintain lasting relationships with consumers beyond the point of sale” (Digital Trends 2017).

By gaining targeted, quality traffic and an online reputation, your site will ultimately become a reliable authority in your niche. This will create opportunities to generate more traffic through links on social media and back links from other relevant websites, ultimately raising your profile and ranking on search engines (GeoTrust white paper, Rank Higher).

Understanding that in today's digital age, a company’s website is at the heart of unlocking these valuable opportunities, reaching targeted audiences and creating a personalised experience, forms the fundamental principle of what iRostrum aims to achieve for our auction partners. With our white lable online auction platform, we ensure all traffic is driven directly to your own online auction platform. Directing all online traffic to your own site rather than a third-party market place gives you the extensive analytics that are central to your business engaging with your customers, meeting their needs and fuelling your company’s success.